Installing

There are a number of language packs available if English is not your preferred language. To see a list of available language packs, try:

$ pacman -Ss firefox-i18n

Add-ons

Firefox is well known for its large library of add-ons which can be used to add new features or modify the behavior of existing features of Firefox. You can find new add-ons or manage installed add-ons with Firefox's "Add-ons Manager."

Adding Firefox search engines

Newer method

If you want to custom one, take a look at: ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxx.default/searchplugins/ where xxx is your profile ID).

Method for root user

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Firefox writes search engine files to /opt/mozilla/lib/firefox/searchplugins, which is, by default, readable only by root. This means users cannot add search engines. You can chmod o+w this folder to install a search engine.

To remove search engines, remove the appropriate search engine files in /opt/mozilla/lib/firefox/searchplugins. The next time you start Firefox, the engine will not be in the list.

arch-firefox-search

Projects related to Firefox

Firefox derivatives

Iceweasel - The name of two different Firefox forks. One was a GNU project; the name of this project has since changed to Icecat. The second is being developed by Debian and is based on 2.0. At the time of writing the AUR only has Icecat.

GNU/IceCat - formerly known as GNU IceWeasel, is a web browser distributed by the GNU Project. IceCat, which is made entirely of free software, is a fork of Mozilla Firefox. It is compatible with the GNU/Linux operating system and almost all of Firefox's addons. GNU/IceCat really can fully replace Firefox.

Tips and Tricks

This section has been distilled out into a discrete Firefox Tweaks article.

Troubleshooting

Firefox 4 New Menu Bar/Firefox Button

By default, Arch Linux shows the classic layout of the menu bar. To activate the new Firefox 4 layout with the "Firefox" button replacing the menu bar, uncheck View -> Toolbars -> Menubar.

In GNU/Linux, you will just get a plain grey button instead of the new orange one from Windows. However you can change this to a nice Firefox icon, by adding to your
~/.mozilla/firefox/userprofile/chrome/userChrome.css
this:

Note: You need to create both the chrome directory and userChrome.css, if they do not already exist.

Open containing folder problems (KDE)

If Firefox launches something other than your preferred file manager when using the "Open Containing Folder" option in the Downloads manager, make sure you select your file manager of choice (e.g. Dolphin) in KDE's System Settings:

System Settings -> Default Applications -> File Manager

If you have already selected your file manager of choice and Cervisia (or a file manager other than your favorite) is opening modify your user's ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list to include these two lines:

Firefox keeps creating ~/Desktop even when this is not desired

How to prevent plugins from allowing popups?

Ever wondered why pop-ups appear even though you have blocked them? It seems that the Flash plugin can bypass default settings and annoy us with those pesky pop-ups. Fear not, for we can prevent it from doing that.

To get around it:

Type about:config into the Firefox location bar.

Right-click on the page and select New and then Integer.

Name it privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins

Set the value to 2.

The possible values are:

0: Allow all popups from plugins.

1: Allow popups, but limit them to dom.popup_maximum.

2: Block popups from plugins.

3: Block popups from plugins, even on whitelisted sites.

Middle-click errors

! The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded.

Another symptom is that middle-clicking results in unexpected behavior, like accessing a random web page.

The reason stems from the use of the middle mouse buttons in UNIX-like operating systems. The middle mouse button is used to paste whatever text has been highlighted/added to the clipboard. Then there is the possibly conflicting feature in Firefox, which defaults to loading the URL of the corresponding text when the button is depressed. This can be disabled like so:

Open the browser, and type the following into the address bar:

about:config

Search for middlemouse.contentLoadURL and set it to false.

Alternatively, having the traditional scroll cursor on middle-click (default behaviour on Windows browsers) can be achieved by searching for general.autoScroll and setting it to true.

Backspace does not work as the 'Back' button

As per this article, the feature has been removed in order to fix a bug. Follow the next steps to retain the original behaviour.

Open the browser and type the following address:

about:config

Search for browser.backspace_action and set it to 0 (zero).

Firefox does not remember login information

It may be cause of a corrupted cookies.sqlite file in Firefox's profile folder. In order to fix this, just rename or remove the cookie.sqlite while Firefox is not running.

Open a terminal of choice and type the following:

$ cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/
$ rm -f cookies.sqlite

Note: xxxxxxxx represents a random string of 8 characters.

Restart Firefox and see if it solved the problem.

Broken websites / input fields with dark Gtk Themes

When using a dark GTK theme, one might encounter Internet pages with unreadable input and text fields (p.e. Amazon - white text on white background). This can happen because the site only sets either background or text color, and Firefox takes the other one from the theme.

A work around is to explicitly setting standard colours for all web pages in ~/.mozilla/firefox/.../chrome/userContent.css.

The following sets input fields to standard black text / white background; both can be overridden by the displayed site, so that colors are seen as intended:

"Do you want Firefox to save your tabs for the next time it starts?" dialog does not appear

Firefox has high CPU usage and feels slow on scrolling with nVidia GPUs

In some cases, forcing the proprietary nVidia driver to store pixmaps in video memory instead of system memory can yield massive improvements in the perceived performance of pixmap-intensive applications like Firefox. Run

$ nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2

from the terminal; if desired results are achieved add this line to a script and use your desktop environment's autorun facilities to execute it on every startup. Alternatively, add the parameter to your ~/.nvidia-settings-rc and run